Talk of more U.S. 'engagement' in peace process sets up next president
for failure

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There was a time, not all that long ago, when the conventions of the
two major political parties were more than carefully orchestrated photo
opportunities and pep rallies.

The television networks have long since acceded their audiences wishes
and ended the tradition of "gavel-to-gavel" coverage of these political
jamboree. They are right to do so. Once the conventions stopped being
news events and became, instead, endless partisan infomercials, there
was no reason to treat them as being any different from any other
garden-variety political rally.

But that hasn't stopped the parties from continuing some of the
time-honored traditions of the convention. One of these is the drafting
party platform.

No president has ever taken his party's platform seriously as a
template for governing. Nor will many people, even political junkies,
bother to read every stultifying page of either party's manifesto.

But interest groups still lobby both the Democrats and the Republicans
and, if only behind the scenes, lobby to have it accommodate their
positions. And, as such, what emerges from the process can be evaluated
as reflecting the strength of various ideas and their supporters within
the political establishment.

CONSENSUS REFLECTED
On that score, the
language of the draft that has been released of the
2008 Democratic Party platform on the Middle East speaks volumes.

The document, much like the platforms of both parties for the last half
century, bears witness to a commitment to Israel's security and
well-being. Its language reflects a consensus shared across the
political spectrum that is not the work of some furtive interest group,
but the will of the majority of Americans.

Given the length and the detail of the language in the platform, you
would think that all those groups that call themselves "pro-Israel"
would be pleased.

But that would be far from true. According to the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, one "pro-Israel group" is nonplussed.

Why? Because the accompanying language about the peace process calls
for the United States to "take an active role to help secure a lasting
settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," was insufficient to
suit the left-wing J Street's taste.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the director of J Street - the new lobbying group that
seeks to be an alternative to the mainstream American Israel Public
Affairs Committee - said that "it's not enough for the next president
to commit again to trying."

For him, the pro-forma pledge to "engage" again in hands-on diplomacy
alluded to in the Democratic platform isn't good enough. What he wants
is for the next president "to muster the political will for an
intensive effort that brings the parties together, hammers out their
differences and brings about an agreement."

That sounds fair and even high-minded. But a quick translation of that
statement into plain English shows that what he wants is a president
who will ignore the desires of both the people of Israel and the vast
majority of Americans, and beat Jerusalem into submission. A study of
the history of the last 15 years of the peace process makes it
perfectly clear who it is that will be "hammered" in any such process
and what the outcome of any such effort will be.

Sadly, the marginal J Street is far from isolated on this issue. Its
position was echoed by an Aug. 18 New York Times editorial that called
on President to Bush to engage in just the sort of hands-on pummeling
of Israel in pursuit of appeasement of the Palestinians that J Street
seems to think the Jewish state needs.

Yet since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993, it has been Israel
that has made concession after concession on territory, settlements and
empowerment of the terrorist groups that the Palestinians have chosen
for their leaders. The response has been a strengthening of the most
extreme elements in Palestinian society. Israel has traded land and
legitimacy not for peace, but for more terror.

The majority of Israelis have shown that the
y are ready for even more
concessions, but not for more violence. If most think that further
pullbacks are imprudent, it is because they now understand that the
recent past has proven that the result will be more bloodshed.

But, so the conventional wisdom of the day here runs, what is needed to
revive a peace process that was slain by Yasser Arafat's refusal to
take "yes" for an answer at Camp David in 2000 and by the terrorist
bombing offensive he launched in response to Israeli initiatives, is an
American president who will "hammer" the Israeli government and the
Palestinians into doing what's right.

This belief is fueled by the fact that for most of the last several
years, the current president refused to engage in the sort of hands-on
diplomacy that his predecessor Bill Clinton attempted. George W. Bush
cut off relations with the P.A. in 2002 when he belatedly realized that
the late Arafat was a terrorist, and didn't resume dealing with them
until that criminal was dead and buried. And though Bush has pushed
hard for aid to Mahmoud Abbas, the powerless successor to Arafat, he
has refused to deal with Abbas' Hamas rivals - the true power in
Palestinian society today.

Though Bush foolishly restarted the Clintonian style of engagement last
fall at Annapolis, Md., the failure of this doomed gesture was
attributed to Bush's late start, rather than the fact that Israel has
no credible peace partner. But since in contemporary American politics,
everything that the unpopular Bush does and has done is, by definition,
wrong, that has led to a near-universal belief that more "engagement"
in the Middle East is what is necessary.

But whatever your opinion might be of Bush, this is nonsense.

CLINTON'S EXAMPLE
The peace process has never been about the will of an American
president to make peace. No one wanted an agreement more than Bill
Clinton. The Camp David and Taba talks he engaged in did not fail
because of lack of effort, but because the Americans and the Israelis
wanted a Palestinian state more than the Palestinians.

Had Bush or even Al Gore tried to restart Clinton's track in 2001 or
thereafter, the notion that they would have succeeded with Arafat is
farcical. The chances for real progress have always rested with the
Palestinians - and the Arab world in general - to rise above the
political culture of hate for Jews and the Jewish state that has
dominated their existence for a century. With Hamas in control of Gaza
and with a weak P.A. that is itself unable to give up the conflict with
Israel, a U.S. commitment to intensive talks will only set up the next
president for a failure on the scale of Clinton's Camp David fiasco,
which set the stage for more violence, not peace.

The good
news is that there's little doubt that anything that either
platform says about engagement or anything else will be forgotten next
year. The bad news is that the lobby for hammering Israel and its
highly placed friends in the media will remain with us. Let's hope that
whoever is elected in November has the sense to ignore them.

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